In spite of the number of instant messaging tools available, email has never been more popular.

From being merely a business communication tool to becoming a communication platform, email is how a wide range of businesses operate, relationships are formed and new business is made.

Whether you’re setting appointments with your clients or sending your first cold outreach to a potential lead or referral, email is often the preferred medium.

Not sold on the idea of email being the preferred medium?Here’s a real-life example of this in the real estate world:

You’re wanting to reach out to a cold lead who could possibly become a client down the line. What do you think would be the more ‘welcomed’ first touch - sending an email introducing yourself as a local real estate expert or delivering the same pitch through a cold-call?

It’s safe to say that your potential warm lead, would prefer to receive an email from you first rather than an invasive phone call.

Delegate tasks easily

Delegating tasks is certainly one of the most important functions of Gmail.

The problem is delegating tasks using email forwarding is cumbersome and quite a messy process, hindering your productivity.

With Hiver, you can utilize the shared labels feature.

Within Gmail there is feature which allows you to label your emails and organize them into folders. With the shared labels feature, you can share these labels with your team. Using this you can delegate tasks to team members and even monitor them.

Not sure what I mean?

Let’s say you’ve received a general inquiry from a potential lead which you’d like to pass off to your Assistant to follow up with.

With the Hiver shared labels feature, you can create a label titled ‘Task : Follow Up With Rose’ and share it with your Assistant. You Assistant will then receive a notification of the shared task so they can start working on the follow up. Once the task is done, your Assistant can add a ‘Done’ label to the task, notifying you that this task has been completed.

Open up communication amongst your team

Sending mail to the team every time you get an update from the client isn’t practical, and it often results in long email threads.

And, if you have to look for the update for reference later in future, you will need to comb through every single email.

Hiver’s shared notes features lets you attach notes to the email itself which you can update regularly with relevant information and updates. The notes are accessible for anyone on your team to read through.

In short, it works like an internal chat tool.

All notes are saved and accessible to you for future reference.

Easily track who is doing what

It’s quite common for real estate firms or brokerages to use generic customer inquiry email accounts such as yourfirm@customersupport.com

These generic email accounts are created so that multiple team members have access to the account and can work on each of the emails.

The problem here is, how do we know which team member is working on which email task?

You can imagine that this would be a collaboration nightmare.

Hiver’s shared mailbox works to solve this problem.

Next to each email there is an option for you to assign the email to an employee. This way no two employees will accidentally work on the same customer query or email.

You can also easily track the status of each of the assigned tasks. If a task is not done the status will show as ‘Pending’, otherwise it will be ‘Finished’.

You no longer have to go through the hassle of requesting your teammates for a status update.Last Thoughts

From personal experience, I’ve learned that ignoring email collaboration adds more hours to the overall workload, stealing that time away from your family, or yourself. Not only that but you end up unnecessarily spending a huge part of the day squinting at your screen, combing through an unorganized email inbox.

Take effective measures to make the most of your email without suffering a productivity loss with Hiver.

If you’re interested in getting started with Hiver, click the link button to start your free 14 day trial.

Niraj Rout is the founder of Hiver, an app that turns Gmail into a powerful customer support and collaboration tool. Niraj works on programming, customer support and sales, and also contributes to design and UI.